notes Crispy Gentlemen is built with four contrasting sections of music, each featuring a different color from bass clarinetist Christa van Alstine. I started with these discrete passages as a nucleus in the center of the piece, then worked my way out (both forwards and backwards), constantly revisiting and replaying the music along the way. I copied and and pasted snippets, reordering and transforming their presentation ad infinitum, until the piece began and ended with a dense mosaic of all the material in short spurts in rapid succession. The counterpoint between individual lines, and the proportions between the musical sections are constantly in flux, with one player slowing down as another speeds up, one chunk getting clipped as another stretches out. This should result propulsive and thorny music with an underlying rhythmic grid that is not always perceptible.

The title is a reference to the music's texture, which sounds like its composite parts have been fried with hot grease in a shallow pan.